Writing about, inspired by, and tangentially related to the work of the great Trinidadian Marxist

Thursday, February 14, 2013

Radical Neglect; Or, Did Dorner have an Addressee?

I stop somewhere waiting for
you

--Whitman

We stop somewhere, waiting
for one another, on the lookout for someone whom we will recognize as one of
us. Sometimes we encounter one another and, in twos or threes but rarely more,
read Marx or Kropotkin or whatever together. We hope and despair together about
utterly fantastic things. More frequently, our encounters are fleeting: eye
meets eye on a train over a copy of Tiqqun, and we share a recognition that we
are less alone than we thought—a fact that only intensifies our loneliness when
we disembark and head back to our jobs and wonder why we can’t spend all of our
time around people with opinions on European insurrectionists. We know that
there are more of us than we could know. We scan the world for signs that we are
coming, and we tweet and blog in the hopes of finding one another. We hope that
someone out there will have said, “I stop somewhere, I’m waiting for you,” that
our address will have reached her, and that she’ll write back—leave some trace,
some sign, that we’re out there. We know that most of our addresses will never
find an addressee, that our writing is an unwriting, that our radicalism will never
have taken root in the world. But we write—lonely and alone—within the horizon
of a sublime vista of a democracy to come, one to be peopled by people like us.
And so we keep writing. And reading.

We are told that Christopher
Dorner was killed while hiding out from police. Sure, no doubt he was doing
that, but something more, too: Looking out from his mountain cabin upon a
fucked up democratic vista, Dorner had stopped somewhere, waiting for us, for we
who might arrive, who might resonate to and with his manifesto. No doubt he
wrote while he waited; the conflagration that consumed the cabin equally
consumed an archive. The fugitive words of a fugitive that will never take
root. Dorner killed to gain an audience. To secure an addressee. To become an
addressor.

Dorner’s act is not an action
that we—the vague we that we are, the inchoate dispersed multitude that fleetingly
assembles itself in moments of ephemeral recognition—perform, or even
contemplate. I don’t kill to gain an audience for my posts; I write, I leave
traces, I let you, whoever you are, know that I’m waiting for you, for us, and
I have faith that sometimes you will leave traces, too. I don’t kill to gain an
addressee because I have access to an imagined super-addressee, the you that
will have arrived, perhaps. It keeps me sane, it keeps me going, it transforms
the holding pattern of my political despair into something more like a hopeful
vigil, a waiting for our spectral multiplicity to materialize in the world. I
want to ask: Did Dorner have access to this imaginary, to imagine his
becoming-manifest in the horizon opened by a thought of a radical super-addressee?
I’ll rephrase by citing some tweets from Project Cambio from February 13th
(@ProjectCambio): “Sad that all these internet radicals are throwing #Dorner to
the wolves for his lack of impeccable radical politics.” “Would you have let
#Dorner into your radical spaces? Would you have shown #solidarity with a
confused and angry ex-cop?” “#Dorner most likely had ZERO access to space to
discuss any of the subjects that radicals hold so dear.” The “spaces” cited by
Project Cambio are not simply material spaces—bookstores and infoshops,
kitchens or apartments. These “spaces” include the imaginative spaces and
spacings of our utterances and addresses. Is the imagined ambit of our address
wide enough—perhaps even Whitman-esque enough—to have included Dorner as a
possible addressee? Would Dorner ever have resonated to a radical text as if it
were addressed to him, to him in his particularity? Prior to killing cops,
could Dorner have imagined himself as occupying a position as and within the
inchoate and dispersed “we” that we—you, me, and everyone we do not yet
know—inhabit when we try to become manifest to one another?

I don’t think so. And that’s
the lesson that we need to take from the brief public life of Christopher
Dorner. Those radicals that aren’t critiquing non-radical aspects of Dorner’s
politics applaud his burst of violence with infantile Tiqqun-lite phrases. I’m
not against political violence at all, but we need to question the conditions
of possibility that made Dorner’s solitary and isolated acts of violence
necessary. On one hand, sure, Dorner’s violence testifies to the shrinking
space of political legibility accorded to people (and certainly black men in
LA) in a neoliberal world. In brief, neoliberal governance names the
organization of a social formation wherein the speech of most can never become
publically meaningful action. I call it neglect (etymologically, “to not
read”): we write and speak knowing that our words will do nothing, that know
one is reading them. No institutional mechanisms exist to make our speech acts
felicitous. In such conditions, one’s speech only becomes efficacious through
contingency or violence; violence becomes a perfectly rational mode of acceding
to the airy world of communicative rationality. Dorner knew this; he realized
it through his engagement with the LAPD. And so Dorner killed to gain an
addressee, to gain a hearing, to become manifest in a world where the words of
most do not come to light, where they have no phenomenality, where they are
always already ash and cinders.

But, on the other hand,
Dorner’s violence testifies to the non-availability of alternative sources of
political legibility and alternative modalities of generating meaningful
speech. It might be that you, me, and everyone that we do not yet know do not
use violence to produce an addressee because we know that there are alternative
sites of address, other forms and sources of attention to solicit. We stop
somewhere, we wait for one another, and sometimes we connect in university
reading groups and in infoshops, in groups writing letters to prisoners and in
marches. We are imaginable to one another as an other world, and it’s this
imaginary that allows us, jaunty and happy, to ironize the dominant as a source
of political legibility, to say Fuck the State, Fuck Capitalism, Fuck the
Police. I could be wrong, perhaps I can’t see the other words he inhabited, but
I don’t think that Dorner understood himself as living in a world where some
waited—even if he did not know them, even if he could not name them—to receive
and resonate with his words. We need to ask why. Maybe our addresses can’t gain
any traction in the lifeworlds of someone like Dorner, a former cop/naval
officer invested in a certain notion of honor. Maybe our addresses never
reached him, blocked off by the lines of race, class, and habitus. Maybe our
addresses did reach him, but not in a meaningful genre of address. Maybe they
reached him and he became resonant with them and he showed up, say, to Occupy,
but we were not prepared to receive him; perhaps we turned him away, we said
that we wouldn’t wait for him. And, finally, maybe our addresses did reach him
and he just didn’t give a fuck about us, whoever we are, whatever we think
we’re doing. The fact is, though, that Dorner’s addresses would not have
reached us had he not killed. And
when the conditions of possibility for legibility within a radical world are
identical to the conditions of possibility for legibility within a neoliberal
public, well—we’re fucked, people. We need to find a way to find the words not
obviously intended for us, to encounter genres and lifeworlds that don’t come
packaged in some bullshit Semiotext(e) “intervention,” that aren’t addressed to
the U.S.’s radical milieu. We need a radical hermeneutics, one that always
reads for whom it fails to read, and in this fashion incorporate into our
imagined scenes of address those subjects anxiously bereft of an addressee. We
need to stop and wait and see who comes and be prepared to be surprised by who
appears.

This isn’t simply a liberal
bid for inclusion. To the contrary: Redressing neglect is the minimal demand
that we can make of radical politics. Indeed, proliferating sites of political
legibility is the positive,
constructive work of anarchy. We undertake the negative labor of
anarchy—fucking up the “state,” which is nothing more than a catachresis for
any form of hierarchized sociality—in order to free up the possibility of
proliferating worlds. CLR James excelled at this, at finding new genres to
transform the desperate lifeworlds of workers, sharecroppers, colonial peoples
into something glowing with political import. The radical possibilities of
Occupy inhered in its formation of a space wherein the quotidian, desperate
worlds of people could come into contact, wherein complaint—about banks, about
debt, about the racism and sexism of the movement itself—could become
politically legible speech. At encampments we stopped and waited for one
another…and waited and waited, and the speeches got too long, yes, and the GAs
became shit-shows, yes, but for a while we waited and listened and, addressed
and addressing, we fell into a new world of care. It’s indeed surprising that,
after the police destroyed our world, there have not been more Dorners, more
subjects craving to feel once more the glow of another’s attention. They are no
doubt out there, speaking in genres and idioms and modes of address that we do
not know we don’t know. We desperately need to proliferate sites of address for
these missives, to incorporate neglected subjects into our not-yet-inclusive
democratic vistas.

Dorner stopped and waited.
Perhaps he had waited before—not in cabins, no, but in the knowledge that his
political speech had meant nothing to the LAPD, in the loneliness of governed
urban space, in the racialized castle of his skin. Back then, Dorner did not
know that we were waiting for him. We didn’t, either. As Dorner lammed it, as
Dorner hid in his cabin, I like to think that he was writing, that he was
preparing a new text to manifest himself. This time, though, he wrote knowing
full well that his text had an addressee, that people stopped and waited for
his words. And did we not all stop and wait as the helicopters circled the
cabin, as the pigs closed in, as they burned the cabin down? Archived in the
ash, archived as ash, are the only words Dorner wrote with the certitude that
someone would read them. Too late, we waited for his words to arrive. Missing him in one place, it remains for us to search another.

*

To all of you who will have
read this address—and, above all, to you whom I will have always neglected to
intend.

2 comments:

You can't reach someone like Dorner because your writing is overly complex, opaque and completely orthogonal to the way of the warrior. And I think you know this. The very fact that you write "[m]aybe our addresses can’t gain any traction in the lifeworlds of someone like Dorner, a former cop/naval officer invested in a certain notion of honor." You may not like such things. You may think that personal honor is a joke, or unsophisticated, or "not leftist" or whatever snarky term of approbation you prefer. But the fact is that successful leftist revolutionaries, or even leftist labor organizers historically depended on things like personal relationships and yes, debts of honor, if they are going to prevail when the full forces of the state and oligarchy are deployed against them.

I met people like you at Occupy, English and film professors and graduate students full of themselves, with their skills at close reading and deconstruction. They donned some black clothing and shitkicker boots, yelled out "solidarity," and "security culture" and smashed shit. It didn't mean they knew the first thing about how to know when they were being peeped out by plainclothes cops while waiting to pay a bail bondsman. It didn't mean they knew jack shit about how to confront the riot police and win, when they didn't have 40,000 people backing them up. It didn't mean they knew anything about organizing broke-ass people of color who have the police on them every day. Oh no.

The skill set of hermeneutics is not the same as applying strategy and tactics. One is about constructing an argument that will be plausible to your peers. The other is about prevailing in struggles of life and death, where the only judge is the sharp edge of reality cutting you down in your tracks if you fuck up.

I think that you're kind of writing past me, Tim--or, more accurately, writing with me, but our registers are different to the point that they seem antagonistic. In terms of "honor," for instance: my point was precisely that to take such terms as "a joke, or unsophisticated, or 'not leftist'" is to foreclose the revolutionary possibilities that might be embedded in such terms. I'm after a reading practice that makes such possibilities visible. A hermeneutic. No doubt such a reading practice isn't the same thing as a tactic for confronting riot police (did I suggest that? I didn't mean to), but I hardly think that interpretations of the social are useless for social struggle. And, unless you think the work of politics can only begin after a lobotomy, you know that, too. Political activity necessitates careful attention--a close reading of a given distribution of forces, a careful interpretation of life circumstances of those whom we meet. The holier-than-thou gesture to the field of practice is really too much when we consider that your "warrior" Dorner was himself invested in offering an interpretation of his social world. At the very least, Dorner saw thinking, interpreting, writing as a technology of political practice. So, let's can the obvious professor-bashing shite and try thinking more productively about how we can draw together varied and discontinuous idioms of interpreting our worlds.